Sacred mysteries: Luther thought he had a sound reason for his strong
antipathies, Christopher Howse discovers.

When Luther said that, for his followers, "the devil is nearer to them than their skirt or their shirt, surrounding them more tightly than their own skin", was the essential Luther speaking, or was it part of his inevitable late-medieval view of the world?

A useful new book, <i>Martin Luther</i>, by Scott H Hendrix, in the very Short Introduction series (Oxford, £7.99), gives several pages to Luther's beliefs about angels, good and bad, the latter including the devil. Against the devil's power, Luther believed, every person had a protecting guardian angel.

This is a belief that had never been introduced into a Christian creed, so it might seem surprising that Luther retained it when he rejected so much else. However, there is an element about his belief in angels that connects with Islam and his ideas about it.

For Luther believed that it was wrong to ask one's guardian angel to pray for one. It was only permissible to give thanks to God for the guardian angel's providential care. This attitude to angels reflected two Lutheran principles: "Christ alone" and a return to a more primitive Christianity.

Luther held, in very strong terms, that the papacy had spoilt both principles. The pope, he believed, was antichrist, promoting "rosaries, pilgrimages, the worship of saints, masses, monkery". Luther wanted to detach saints or angels from the unique role of Christ as redeemer of the world.

Islam had gone further, in detaching any "associates" from the sovereign mercy of God. It was "God alone". The Koran strenuously opposes any Trinitarian God, and stresses that the prophet Jesus is but a man: "The parallel of Jesus with God is like that of Adam. He created him from dust and then said to him, 'Be'." (3:59). Muslims are to say to the people of the Scripture: "We serve only God and we associate nothing with Him." (3:64)

Luther was, of course, far from rejecting Jesus as God. He rejected, rather, the association of the intercession of Mary and the other saints with God's grace. Moreover, he was trying to go back to before the corruption of Christianity by the papacy and other diabolical powers.

"Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian. He was a man of pure faith," says the Koran (3:67). "The nearest people to Abraham are those who follow him and this prophet." The Torah and the Gospel were corrupt versions of the pristine faith.

Luther was no particular student of Islam, though he wrote a preface to a Latin translation of the Koran in 1542. But he yoked it (under the label of "the Turks") with Judaism as an ally of the devil in setting up a false rival to the true faith of Christianity. "Jews, Turks, papists, radicals abound everywhere," he wrote in 1543. "In their conceit all of them claim to be the church and God's people."

Islam he saw as a combination of pagan, Jewish and Christian beliefs. It had "no redeemer, no forgiveness of sins, no grace, no Holy Spirit", and it would be better to die than to live under Turkish rule.

It seems to me that, despite the central difference in belief about the nature of Jesus, there is a parallel between Luther's notion of salvation by faith alone, and the Islamic idea of the sufficiency of faithful submission to God, the merciful.

Luther's violent language against Turks and papists becomes super-heated when he speaks of the Jews. It is impossible to read without horror his pamphlet <i>On the Jews and their Lies (1543). </i>On to its personalised hatred we<i> </i>cannot help projecting the unspeakable treatment of the Jews by Germans in the 20th century.

Islam blamed Jews and Christians for corrupting God's original revelation. Luther blamed Jews and Muslims for persisting in a rival "church", a crime of which papists were guilty, in addition to corrupting God's revelation. The strength of his conviction that he had found forgiveness through faith made him a good hater.